Guardian Editor on Evolution of Journalism

In 1976, a week after graduating from college with a degree in English literature, Alan Rusbridger joined the Cambridge Evening News, a regional British newspaper that employed more than seventy journalists. He got his assignment every day by consulting an A4 diary that the news editor kept on his desk, listing every council committee, health, fire, ambulance, water, and utilities-board meeting. The economics of the Evening News' journalism were almost an afterthought: just under fifty thousand people a day paid for copies of the newspaper; local businesses bought display advertising; lucrative classified ads sustained it as well. Rusbridger went on to a decorated four-decade journalism career. In 1995, he became the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, and, by the time he stepped down, in 2015, the Guardian had one of the most-read English-language Web sites in the world.